Law erases Bushmen's rights to Kalahari

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One of the last residents of a Bushmen village prior to
resettlement.Photo: Supplied

In a Machiavellian move that would have been denounced as racist
if ever introduced by one of Africa's former colonial powers, the
Botswanan Government is about to enact a constitutional change that
will end forever the rights of Bushmen to their traditional
lands.

The cynical move by Botswana's President Festus Mogae has been
made as Kalahari Bushmen pursue a landmark case in the country's
High Court seeking the right of return to their ancestral land in
the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

The reserve, the size of Switzerland, was the last part of
southern Africa where the Bushmen had land rights where they could
live according to their own time-honoured culture. The Bushmen were
the original inhabitants of the region thousands of years before
black tribes arrived from the north and white men from Europe.

Botswana's former British colonial rulers gave the reserve, a
vast expanse of hot sand and bush without permanent surface water,
to the Gana and Gwi Bushmen, as a place where they could live
alongside the Kalahari's abundant wildlife. The first president of
Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, reaffirmed the commitment at
independence in 1961. Under the Bushmen, who hunted only for the
pot and offered prayers of thanks to each animal they killed, the
Kalahari lion prides and gemsbok and springbok herds
multiplied.

But in 1997, as international mining companies began discovering
diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes beneath the reserve's burning
sands, Government officials from the majority Tswana tribe swept
into their settlements in truck convoys and forcibly removed 1200
people. They dumped the people on a bleak, dusty plain beyond the
reserve.

The forcible removals were in breach of the Bushmen's guaranteed
constitutional rights and were accompanied by widespread
allegations of torture.

Successive waves of expulsions followed until all 2500 surviving
Bushmen had been removed from the reserve to desolate settlements
where they are unable to hunt and where there is no work.
Alcoholism, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases are
rife.

The Bushmen decided to fight back in 2002 with support from
local and international human rights organisations. They launched a
lawsuit in Botswana's High Court asserting their rights under the
constitution to return to their ancestral home.

Lawyers argued on behalf of the Bushmen that they were being
persecuted by the Tswana majority in the same way as Australia's
Aborigines had been treated by white settlers. "There are fewer and
fewer sites in the world where the people inhabiting them have
links going back tens of thousands of years," said Roger Chennells,
one of the lawyers.

The Government has dragged out the court case in an apparent
attempt to break the finances and the morale of the Bushmen. At the
end of last year the Bushmen resumed their challenge after a
three-month postponement because they had run out of money and had
to send envoys around the world to raise funds.

Then last month came a devastating blow to the Bushmen. The
Government introduced legislation in Parliament in Gaborone, the
Botswanan capital, to amend the constitution to remove any of the
lingering rights to the reserve.

President Mogae has little sympathy for the Bushmen. He uses a
derogatory Tswana word, Basarwa, meaning "people with no cattle"
(as opposed to the cattle-owning Tswana), to describe the
hunter-gathering Bushmen.

The Government amendment has already had two readings. When it
obtains its third reading soon it will render the Bushmen's court
case dead. Their only hope now seems to lie in an appeal they have
made to the World Bank, which is funding the prospecting.